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The five worst parking tickets you can get
by Garrison Frost Anyone who has lived in the South Bay of Los Angeles for any period of time is familiar with the Eight Stages of Getting a Parking Ticket:
But while our reactions to parking tickets tend to follow the same pattern, not all parking tickets are the same. Some are, for the most part, understandable and straightforward. For instance, we understand that the common meter expired ticket – the bread and butter of any parking enforcement division – is really just a revenue generator. Like the meters themselves, these tickets are a way for the city in question to profit on the desirability of its town center or proximity to the beach. These tickets are a tax and everybody knows this. And we know that the tax isn't on our car or our shopping habits or our laziness. Rather, the meter expired ticket is a tax on our stupidity. If we're stupid enough to not put money in the meter, we deserve the ticket, and to complain is merely to trumpet our absent-mindedness. Then there are the other tickets, the ones that seem only intended to exploit us, to make us feel small. At best, these tickets are a ridiculous joke. At worst, they're a scary combination of mind control, theft and insult. Here is my list of the worst five, although if you've parked enough times in Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach or Redondo Beach, you already know them all too well. Head In Only. This one is issued when a driver has the gall to back his or her car into a space rather then pull straight in, and it makes the list for the simple reason that I've never heard a remotely reasonable explanation for how violating it harms the public good in any way whatsoever. When pressed on the reason for the citation, an official will proceed to offer up some kind of crap about how the distance from the back bumper to the wheels is different in every car, so that drivers will be more likely to back into the meter itself and damage it. This would seem like a problem to be solved by the Public Works Department. Moreover, if we as drivers were so likely to back into things, we would lucky to ever get our cars are far as the parking space in question, wouldn't we? No Parking at a Broken Meter. This citation ostensibly was created to keep people from damaging parking meters to avoid having to put coins in them, but in practice its real function is to transfer responsibility for the meters from the city (which installed them to raise revenue) to drivers who only want a place to park. For instance, now a driver has no recourse when he or she puts money in a meter in good faith, only to find that it expires in half the time it's supposed to. Despite what the city thinks, it's not our fault that the meter is broken. But that's what this citation says. It also says that the city is more interested in getting your quarter than letting you park in an empty, legal parking space. Street Sweeping. Living near the beach, all of us are open to arguments from environmentalists that regular street cleaning greatly reduces the amount of pollution that gets from our streets into the ocean through the storm drains. But saving the environment is not the primary motivation most cities have for issuing street sweeping citations. The real reasons are to turn over the parking spaces and to raise revenue. Several cities in the South Bay do a bang-up job of sweeping their streets without posting signs and issuing citations. The ones that do just aren't being honest, and in many cases, they're just sweeping the streets to make a show of it. And let's not even start in on why some cities need to clear the street for as many as four hours when it only takes a matter of seconds for the sweeper to drive through. Compact Space. The entire concept of compact spaces is so convoluted and dishonest that for any city to issue a parking ticket for illegally parking in one is the height of hypocrisy. Most on- and off-street compact spaces haven't been created for any other reason than to accommodate a developer or business district that needs a certain number of parking spaces in order to meet a building code or other standard. In other words, these spaces exist for no altruistic reason, such as to encourage us to drive more fuel efficient vehicles. Which explains why whole lots of these spaces will appear without any regard for the driving habits of the people who are supposed to use them. Furthermore, it is safe to say that very few drivers, if any, have any idea about what constitutes a compact care to the Department of Motor Vehicles. So no one really knows who is and who isn't allowed to park in those spaces. Handicapped Parking Only. No one doubts that people who park in these spaces designated for the disabled are jerks who should have their cars towed or forced to pay a fine, but there is something unseemly about the fact that this ticket is often much more expensive (by a factor of 10 times or more) than any other parking ticket. The reason the ticket is so expensive has less to do with the egregiousness of the violation than with the greed of cash-strapped public agencies anxious to fleece us when we're down. With tax cuts all the rage, bean counters in government have discovered that fines and fees are a quiet way to tax the public. And they've obviously discovered that because no one will come to the defense of someone who illegally parks in a handicapped parking space, they can charge any kind of outrageous fine that they want. So they do. The fine balloons even further due to the fact that every city shares the parking ticket revenue with the state, so in this case violators are dealing with the greedy maw of not one, but two, government agencies. (Feb. 1, 2006) © Copyright 1999-2006 The Aesthetic |
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